A call you would be wise to answer

A call that can change everything with one word.

CARE.CHECK*: How do you respond to fear?

Do you lean in or do you pull away?

Do you ask questions or do you numb?

Do you welcome that scared little friend or do you misjudge it as a dangerous intruder?

I hope this week’s letter will remind you how much strength we hold within our hearts and the underestimated power of Softness.

Because as the person who guides me on this healing journey once reminded me: We CAN do HARD things… softly.

I love you. 

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In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)] 

IF YOU WANT TO LISTEN TO THIS INSTEAD, you can use Speechify, an app through which this Care.Check letter can be read to you by a Care.robot.friend :)

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Hi Care.Friend,

How are you? Under the mask, the story, the circumstance, the protection?

How are you—how soft and open is the area around your heart?

How are you—how’s your gut connection and receivership?

How are YOU?

Someone I love very much is dying.

And they’re deeply struggling.

They’re deeply struggling with their symptoms—with understanding them and meeting their weakened body where it is. They’re struggling with the change of pace, the redefinition of the limits of their agency, the shame that being sick sparks within them, the fear of being a burden for others. They’re struggling with asking for help—and they’re struggling with receiving it even more.

They’re struggling and it’s excruciating to witness… and it’s also such a privilege to get to witness it. 

What a depth we find within ourselves when we choose to honor someone else’s pain—especially a pain that we cannot fix. 

What an even greater calling it is, when that person alternates between phases of highly abusive behaviors and moments of complete surrender to the light they carry. 

What a mirror it is to witness someone who never integrated their shadow meet their end, in a way that magnifies BOTH the darkness and the light.

I am learning so much about love.

And, as usual, I witness that we can only love someone unconditionally when we remain committed to loving ourselves first. 

We can only love with an open heart.

We can only love when we ALLOW ourselves to remain soft.

And soft doesn’t mean weak! Oh no, it doesn’t. I’ve met the fiercest source of strength in my softness.

I’m also learning that we can remain soft in anger, soft in shame and soft in grief. I’m learning THAT’S the true experience of power.

I’m learning that we can show up in the middle of the arena softer than we’ve ever been and not only SURVIVE, but come MORE and more ALIVE, with each minute we soften into. 

I’m learning that my armor is never a sign of my strength but only a reflection of how weak I feel. 

Someone’s armor is always and only proof of their wounds... And hard against hard creates chaos. Softness however melts everything back into love—where we all belong, where we all come from.

I’m also learning that softness doesn’t equal caretaking. Who knew?

I certainly didn’t:

I was a parentified child. Then, I was a physician. And after that I was a life coach. I thought my willingness and devotion to helping others was proof that I was soft… and yet I did all of this carrying a twenty-ton shield and holding a blade.

I was bracing. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t sleep without meds. I couldn’t separate myself from my armor. I had no idea who I was anymore, and I had lost any connection to the beauty and benevolence of what is.

Quiet Joy

It is so interesting to realize how helping others—which comes so naturally to us when we’re centered into our hearts—can also be one of the surest ways to escape those sacred inner temples. 

It’s a subtle shift and yet the most profound one: 

We can anchor into our hearts and allow for the help that will flow through us (and that might look very differently from what we believe help looks like, but it will always HELP the other—which is supposed to be the whole point). OR we can run away from our center hoping to enter someone else’s heart. 

The problem is there is no door on the outside of a heart! We can only enter each other’s hearts, by embodying ours SO DEEPLY that it becomes a portal into the oneness that flows beneath our skins. 

Please, picture a tree trying to help another tree, by connecting through its branches. It will bend and bend and bend until its roots let go of the ground… and then, it will collapse onto the Earth, unable to help anytree anymore. Thank goodness trees are wiser than us!

We now know that they connect and interact with each other through their roots. They each stand their ground and yet, they are all FIERCELY interconnected.

Nature is such a teacher.

* Softness melts everything back into love.*

So here I am, learning to anchor within myself like I have done before. And that’s a journey that feels like a win-win-win. 

It serves my healing and proves to me once more that, by diving into the pain and chaos, we access the purest inner peace and quietest joy. It allows me to support that person that I love so dearly, while protecting myself from the mistreatment. AND it allows me to reembody my singing like never before.

I wrote about this HERE before:

Singing is breathing. And breathing is feeling! And since we cannot heal what we cannot feel, feeling is healing. This is why singing heals those who sing and those who listen. Because breathing is LOVE—and that’s why we all know intuitively that singing is love too. 

So the more I relearn how to feel, the more my breathing transforms! And my singing follows. My singing deepens, expands—and my song is clearer and brighter than ever. 

This humbles my mind greatly.

Because it proves to my mind that our magic comes from our body, from our ability to breathe, from our beating heart. Not from our ability to think! It can’t. 

Our magic can be turned into words and thoughts of course, but thinking is only profound and powerful when it is informed by our essence.

Thinking is meant to be the final step of our self-connection and self- expression. But unfortunately, we’ve been trained to start there. 

Which is why most of us are experiencing so much fear and such a deep sense of disconnection. 

The problem is that when we think first, we bypass the body. And when we bypass our bodies, we lose access to our inner vault of wisdom and more tragically to our inner well of love. It’s isolating and profoundly disempowering. And then we’re left wondering why we feel so resourceless, helpless, powerless… That’s because we literally are when we rely on our mind alone. 

When we think first, we overthink. When we overthink, we underfeel. And when we underfeel, we overthink. That’s a very vicious cycle. One our mind cannot get us out of! Only our hearts can do that.

The good news is that our heart is a very patient creature. Always here, awaiting patiently for its liberation.

It doesn’t attack the shield that keeps it prisoner. It knows better than to defend itself because as Byron Katie always says: “Defense is the first act of war”. So it keeps on drumming the most loving lullaby into our chest, until we’re finally ready to listen—until we’re finally ready to come home.

Our hearts cannot be broken. I deeply believe that.

What breaks are the chains that surround it, and that’s painful, Care.friend. It is, because it frees all the hurt that got frozen into chains in the first place. I wrote about this chain breaking HERE, and I’ll share an extract of that letter below:

“Because instead of rushing through my body and teaching me what I needed to learn, pain was turned into metal, into suffering, into a chain around my heart.

So when the chain breaks, my heart does not just eliminate this unwanted energy, my heart transmutes into love. Because the heart knows that pain was not unwanted, it was a misunderstood messenger delivering a message I needed to hear, to listen to, to hug into healing, to bathe in light and alchemize into inner gold.

Indeed, the heart doesn’t judge the pain that kept it prisoner, the heart offers infinite compassion and genuine curiosity to understand what the pain was so scared of. The heart doesn’t chase away the pain, the heart finally feels it. The heart looks at its jailer and says “I’ll be your shelter now, you’re home, you’re safe, you’re free”.

Our hearts don’t break, they open. Our pain is not a sign that something went wrong, it’s an important part of our experience. The chains are meant to break, and that is meant to be a painful process. Nothing has gone wrong! It was supposed to be this way; and that’s okay.

It’s because we couldn’t feel the pain that it turned into chains, not because it was coming to imprison us. When we’re finally feeling it, it can finally turn into love; and what was believed to have broken our heart can finally do what it was meant to, which is make the heart grow stronger and glow brighter.”

Right now I need an open heart. I need a GIANT open heart. 

I need to ground in unconditional love… and that is not a small quest for a human being.

Unconditional love is the way of the soul, it comes naturally to our hearts, but unconditional love is not the default for our humanness. 

Our humanness’s instinct is to defend us. To close it all off and hide what is most precious: our heart. Unfortunately, when we do that, we hide it from ourselves too! We cut ourselves from our ability to feel in order not to feel pain, because we think that pain is dangerous.

But pain is NOT dangerous, repressing pain is. 

Pain is a messenger we need to keep us safe. How ironic that we live in a world whose main focus is to alleviate pain, by ANY means necessary.

And we wonder why pain keeps on multiplying—but that’s because pain loves us! So pain will come growing and growing until we’re finally ready to ackowledge it. 

If your loved one is about to catch fire, you might whisper “stop” first, but you will quickly escalate and speak louder and louder until you have to SCREAM. And you’re willing to scream for as long as it takes. You will not stop screaming until they listen! You will stay nearby until they make it to safety… or until they die.

Pain will never abandon us until we listen. Pain only leaves us once pain knows for sure that we’re in alignment. That’s what Martha Beck calls THE WAY OF INTEGRITY in one of her most beautiful books, called… The Way of Integrity. 

Recently I shared this little prayer on Notes:

“Anger, show me my limits.

Grief, show me my depth.

Anger, Grief, show me where my center is not.

So that I can know where my center is.”

Anger and Grief are misunderstood embodiment of love, and I’m relying on them both fully right now to walk me back into my heart, where unconditional love can flow freely.

I feel my anger vibrating through me to remind me that we’re willing and grateful to be able to help, but that it won’t be done at any cost. Anger is here to remind me that I matter too and that I will not be sacrificed or forgotten, BECAUSE IT SERVES NO ONE.

I surrender to my grief that rocks me gently, while I reckon with the immensity of my love. Grief is here to remind me that I’m a tender, loving creature that needs—and is so worthy of—care, gentleness and support. Grief is here to remind me that I can differentiate that person’s behaviors from their essence, so that I can express all the love that my heart and theirs co-created on Earth.

I’m also learning to hug my fear of getting hurt again by those unconscious toxic behaviors, that show up without warning when that person forgets that they’re deeply loved through their pain (how human).

I’m also learning to hug the subsequent shame that comes up asking me WHY I would tolerate (or deserve maybe?) such mistreatment—and why I couldn’t better protect myself from it. 

I’m learning to hug dear little Fear and say: “I’m a grown up now, I can protect you, I will never leave you alone with anyone or to face anything alone! I’m here. I love you. Come hide into my heart. You’re home.”

I’m learning to hug sweet little Shame and say: “Honey you don’t need to hate me, you need to let me love you. You’re not unlovable, you’re cherished and precious. It’s not your fault when someone abuses you and you don’t deserve any of this. And I can’t prevent it from happening again, it’s true, but I can face it so that YOU don’t have to ever again. Give it over to me. I’m here and you will be safe in my heart now.”

I am learning how to feel because when we stop feeling, we can’t love.

And love is not only my choice, love is the only answer to the questions that awaken us to the sacredness of this human experience:

Who am I? (love)

What is expected of me? (love)

What is it all about? (love)

How can I survive this? (love) 

Who can help me? (love)

What will save me? (love) 

How? (LOVE)

What now? (love)

How can I serve? (love!)

I hope that when pain calls, you will answer the call. 

Dear Care.friend, this won’t be a call to suffer, this will be a call to love. 

The answer to that call will not be found in our ability to run, fight back or conquer.

The answer cannot be found in numbing, cynicism or hopelessness.

The answer will be right here, always within you and all around you. 

And the answer will always be the same, no matter the circumstances of the call:

The answer will be that we ARE love—and that’s why we can love our way through anything. That’s how loving and loved we are. That’s how SAFE we are within our hearts. That’s the POWER OF LOVE.

You’ve got this! We’ve got each other… And Love’s got us. 

(And what a relief it is to open our eyes and heart and realize that we were home all along.)

So feel your pain trustingly,

… and watch everything change.

With kindness, love and light—because I truly believe they’re our most sacred offering to this world.

Always,

leo